The prison sentence “on the Internet” blocked access to lawyers: how the Dodjizasi case exposed the right to appeal was emptied by the executive

The complaint lawyer Wang Fei, a Tibetan entrepreneur, has recently applied for another meeting, and the authorities have still not released him. Public information on 5 October indicates that prison staff mentioned in their telephone calls that family members and lawyers “impacted” the publication of information on the case online. This sentence makes it quite clear that a dispute about a meeting that lasted for many years was prevented not because of the incompleteness of the lawyer ' s formalities or the court ' s decision to restrict it, but because the case was seen by the community.

This was not a temporary rejection, but a chain of blockades that lasted for many years. Dodjizasi was arrested in 2008 and sentenced to life imprisonment for loan fraud in

1. His family and counsel have long maintained that there are serious problems with the evidence and sentencing of the case and have continued to complain. Family visits have been repeatedly blocked in recent years and access to lawyers has been repeatedly restricted.

In 2025, lawyers finally learned from inside the prison that Dojizasi had been beaten in prison. The family then defends their rights publicly. According to the latest disclosures, the prison now uses “Internet impact” as a background reason for refusing to meet. If this is true, it means that the right to meet is being used as a tool to control public opinion: the more attention is paid to the case, the more difficult it is to have access to a lawyer.

The current rules governing the practice of lawyers and prison administration in China do not give prisons the right to block access for long periods of time to lawyers on complaints on the grounds of “bad online influence”. Complaints rely in particular on lawyers to contact themselves, verify injuries, learn about the sentences served and obtain authorization. The practical effect of blocking the meeting was to cut off the source of evidence.

The Daghizasi case evolved from a commercial case to a model of the rule of law, and this is the key: a person sentenced to life imprisonment has been serving a sentence for more than a decade, and family members are still unable to visit them steadily, and the meeting of the complainant's lawyer depends on whether the prison considers outside interest to be “impacted”. Under this structure, prisons are both the authorities that enforce the penalty and, in fact, the gates from which information about complaints can be obtained.

It is not the families who are truly responsible for sending the information online, but why they only send it online to get outside attention for a case that has served 18 years. The use of opinion influence as a justification for punishment only further proves that judicial relief has been taken over by a stable logic.